Latino Americans

Entries for September 2013

Latino Americanspremieres tonight on PBS and it’s a thoughtful and entertaining documentary tracing Latino History in North America going back 500 years. As I was watching a screener of the show that airs tonight, I thought about my own Latino History.

My uncle chronicled that history in a family newsletterConfidencias Los Condes. The story begins in 1884 in Chamela, Jalisco, Mexico when my great grandfather Pedro was born. He was forced into work as a boy when his father, a federal judge, died. Pedro joined the Navy ...

You could say that my journey as a Latina in America is from the perspective of a straddler.At least, that’s how I would have described myself at one time – as someone having one foot in the U. S. and one toe in Mexico.For years I was not quite convinced I belonged to either side.

It was my mother who provided the connection.She was born in a tent on September 16, 1929, the sixth child of my grandmother, a Mexican migrant farmworker, and the only one in ...

Three national heroes—Enriquillo, Bartolomé de las Casas, and Sebastián Lemba—stand on pedestals at the entrance to Museo del Hombre Dominicano, ranked by Lonely Planet as #11 of 120 things to do in Santo Domingo.

To most Dominican kids on summer vacation from New York, the museum ranks low on the list of things to do. But having just entered high school, where I’d been assaulted with questions about my identity, I accepted my uncle’s invitation to El Museo. I remember ...

As a child growing up with two parents from Monterrey, Mexico, there were many challenges that I faced. One of the challenges was that neither of my parents spoke English. My parents, Emilio and Gloria Lopez, moved from Monterrey, Mexico to Bryan, Texas. In the 1960’s, jobs were scarce in Bryan, so we moved to Fresno, California, and this is where my story began. My sister Dora was thirteen years old, my brother Emilio Jr. was ten, and I was seven. Growing up in Fresno, California, my family worked ...

There is a store I visit from time to time, for convenience’s sake or to indulge in nostalgia, where I can find all of Latin America on display.

Under the roof of one vast supermarket I savor the presence of the continent where I was born, go back, so to speak, to my own plural origins. On one shelf, Nobleza Gaucha, the yerba mate my Argentine parents used to sip every morning in their New York exile -- my mother with sugar, my father in its more bitter version. Even ...

I have been asked what it means to be Latina. A loaded question. Well, this is what it means to me, a half-Dominican, half-Puerto Rican Latina. (And of course, this is different for everyone.)

It means being able to go back and forth in two languages without ever noticing that you’re doing so (unless some monolingual person in the room reminds you that you’re being rude because “you’re speaking in Spanish!”)

It's a warm summer night in San Antonio Tejas. I'm doing Tai Chi in the moonlight behind the building I've helped restore, in the southside, my old barrio. My daughter is starting college at my old Alma Mater, Incarnate Word, where I studied Theatre and Acting, and where I first courted her mother, my beautiful wife Valeria, also an actor. Here in this neighborhood, there at that college, and here in this town I told my first stories, played my first characters, danced my first dances, sang ...

In 2012, Pew Hispanic asked the question, “When you think, is it mostly in Spanish or in English?” The answers varied across generations as one might imagine: third generation responders said they mostly think in English, while first generation responders (immigrants) said they mostly think in Spanish. Only 16 percent said they think in both languages.

The survey didn’t go on to specify how exactly this 16 percent thinks in both languages: is it in a Spanglish kind of way, switching words between languages within the same thought? Or ...

My passion for curating can be traced back to the time when I was raised between Brooklyn, New York and Bayamón, Puerto Rico. My maternal grandmother, Gloria del Rio, was the person who raised and set the foundation for who I would become. Mama, as she was known, was the matriarch in our East New York and Brownsville neighborhoods. She had emigrated from Puerto Rico as a single mom, educated herself and dedicated her life to political action community advocacy for Latinos, particularly the elderly. Having been witness to her ...

I met my grandparents for the first time in 1958. They came from the mountains of Lajas, Puerto Rico. A toddler living high in the towers of the projects of New York, my grandfather asked me to bring over the curious black box he had with him. He unsnapped the leather straps, slipped his hands through both loops on each side and stretched it open. My mouth opened and my eyes widened as I heard life breathe from the crinkled accordion skin. An uncle pulled out a cuatro, a cute ...

At no other time since my arrival in 1968 have I been witness to such blatant defamation of immigrants as I am seeing today, and the passing of Arizona’s SB 1070 by the Republican Governor Brewer in 2010 has spawned other copycat anti-immigrant laws in states like Georgia (May 2011), Alabama (June 2011), and South Carolina (June 2011).

I call these states the New Confederacy of the South passing Juan Crow laws that redirect their previous vitriol and racial poison towards African Americans towards brown Latinos today.

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LATINO AMERICANS is a production of WETA Washington, DC; Bosch and Co., Inc.; and Latino Public Broadcasting (LPB); in association with Independent Television Service (ITVS).

Corporate funding for LATINO AMERICANS is provided by The Ford Motor Company. Major funding is provided by Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) and Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). Foundation support is provided by Ford Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, The Rockefeller Foundation, The Arthur Vining Davis Foundations, The Annenberg Foundation and The Summerlee Foundation.

Funding for outreach is supported by a grant from The New York Community Trust.